Pilnyak spent his childhood in provincial towns near Moscow, in Saratov, and in a village on the Volga river. He attended high school in Nizhny Novgorod and a commercial institute in Moscow. In his autobiography he stated that he began writing at the age of nine, but it was the publication of his novelGoly god (1922; The Naked Year) that brought him popularity. This book presents a panorama of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War (1918–20) as seen through a series of flashbacks and close-ups encompassing all levels of society. Its fragmentary, chaotic style matches the character of the times he portrayed.

Pilnyak traveled widely within the Soviet Union and abroad. In the early 1920s he traveled to Germany and Britain, introducing new Soviet literature to the West. The impressions he gathered during his travels did much to determine his perspective on Russian life. At the end of the 1920s and in the 1930s he visited Greece, Turkey, China, and Japan, among other countries.

Pilnyak’s position in Soviet-era literature was, however, equivocal. Although he was considered one of the writers who depicted Soviet life most skillfully, he was regularly subjected to harsh criticism and persecution by Soviet censors. In 1926 he caused a scandal with his Povest nepogashennoy luny (The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon), a scarcely veiled account of the death of Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze, the famous military commander, during an operation. The issue of the magazine in which the tale was published was withdrawn immediately, and a new issue omitting it was put out. Pilnyak was compelled to recant, and the editorial board of the magazine admitted that it had committed a “gross error.” Pilnyak was again in trouble in 1929, when he permitted an émigré publishing house in Berlin to publish his novel Krasnoye derevo (“Mahogany”). The book, which included an idealized portrait of a Trotskyite Communist, was immediately banned in the Soviet Union.

Pilnyak’s doubts and distaste with respect to the Communist Party’s goals and methods became increasingly visible in his novels and stories. But unlike other writers who were being persecuted at the time, Pilnyak declared himself ready to compromise. In an attempt to redeem himself, he wrote Volga vpadayet v Kaspiyskoye more (1930; The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea), a novel whose subject—the construction of a Soviet dam—was intended to glorify the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32), developed for the Soviet Union’s economic growth. In 1931, with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s approval, he traveled to the United States and tried to start a collaboration with the motion-picture studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; it did not come to fruition. He described his journey in Okei: Amerikansky roman (1931; “Okay: An American Novel”). Despite its subtitle, it was a collection of sketches of American life, which Pilnyak depicted in a largely negative manner.

Behaviour that was acceptable in the 1920s could be dangerous in the 1930s, and no declarations or ideologically sound books could save Pilnyak. He was arrested in October 1937, sentenced to death by firing squad, and executed. Although he was posthumously “rehabilitated,” it was not until 1976 that a very limited selection of his works appeared. Only after the mid-1980s, when Pilnyak’s best books were reprinted, was his last novel, Solyanoy ambar (written 1937; “Salt Warehouse”), published.

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